iTunes Bad, WMA Good

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Sure, I could burn all those iTunes-purchased songs to an audio CD, then re-rip them in the format of my choice so they’ll play on other equipment. If I’m not exactly pleased about paying for audio files that are “only” 128k to begin with, I’m certainly not going to be thrilled at the prospect of re-compressing an already lossy format, thus further reducing the sound quality. Not to mention that it would be a gigantic pain in the butt.

I could still love the iPod if it would only play Windows Media Audio files, so I could buy music from any of the several other online music stores (all but Real’s and Sony’s use WMA). It doesn’t, and Apple shows no sign of bending on that principle, so I’m stuck with MP3 format if I want to play cross-compatible music on an iPod. None of those shiny new music stores are selling MP3s, and they’re not about to start.

I also have a problem with AAC’s lack of a quality-based variable bitrate mode. In all the AAC-encoding software I’ve seen, including iTunes’ ripping features, all I can do is pick a bitrate. It’s my understanding that the AAC format actually permits a certain amount of bitrate flexibility in each “frame” (a sub-second interval used in encoding). So what you’re actually getting is an average bit-rate VBR all the time, unless that flexible bitrate value is set to zero, which almost no application does. The long and short of it is that none of the apps I’ve tried give me any control over any of this. What’s worse, iTunes doesn’t give me any control over how it creates filenames (a real pet peeve of mine). Windows Media Player 9 has more options for bitrate and lets me determine how it will create filenames. What’s more, Windows Media Encoder, while not suitable for ripping whole CDs, is free and gives me incredible control over encoding parameters.